A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Full Madmen Need Seek Simpletons Them World

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.

Vasily Grossman

How wrong are those simpletons, of whom the world is full, who look more at... color than at the figures which show spirit and movement.

Michelangelo

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.

Marquis de Sade

All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.

Bram Stoker

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

Jack Kerouac

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

Blaise Pascal

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Jawaharlal Nehru

If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.

William Sloane Coffin

Everything comes by being! Be the love you seek. Be the friend you seek. Be the lover you seek. Be the honesty you seek. Be the integrity you seek. Be the patience you seek. Be the tolerance you seek. Be the compassion you seek.

Bryant H. McGill

It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.

Thomas Sankara

We need many more intrepid women who set out to expand both their and our concepts of the world. We need them in writing just as we need them in politics. We need that sense of adventure, of reaching wider, delving deeper, pushing further afield, whether that field be geographical, intellectual, political, personal, or all of these and more. Enough with decorousness. Let us risk preconceptions and treasured philosophies, bodies and souls. Let us be big and bawdy and full of courage. Let's go.

Lesley Hazleton

In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.